CFP: Testimonial Modernism (9/22/05; NEMLA, 3/2/06-3/5/06)

Panelists must join or rejoin NEMLA and register for the conference byNovember 30, 2005

Testimonial Modernism

This panel examines the ways in which theories of testimony and witnessing canbe productively examined with recourse to Modernist literature and throughthis examination, to interrogate the place and method of parrhesia, ortruth-telling, in Modernism. What gives literature its specific ability totell the truth for writers like Robert Musil, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolfwho writes "where truth is important I prefer to write fiction"? Theories ofliterature of testimony and witnessing, or "Lit Wit," have heretofore beenfocused primarily on Holocaust texts and often "read" biography into thefiction being examined. Just as there is a truth-value to fictitiousliterature that testifies, Jacques Derrida points out the fictive-value oftruth when it is "framed" as testimony: "In order to remain testimony, it musttherefore allow itself to be haunted. It must allow itself to be parasitizedby precisely what it excludes from its inner depths, the possibility, atleast, of literature." For modernist writers, truth is not best expressedthrough the "realist" narratives of their predecessors but is articulatedthrough stylized techniques that re-present rather than represent. That is,the writing makes what is written about present, again. Thus the telling oftruth and the way of telling are equally at issue for the Modernist."Postmodernist" thinkers of testimony and witnessing such as Shoshana Felmanand Giorgio Agamben interpret the experience of Holocaust survivors via theirwriting and World War I poets such as Sigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen alsomark experience with the fictional rendering of testimony with themselves aswitnesses, and truth gets articulated as fiction. Even writers not directlyinvolved in the fighting bear witness to events of the social, historical, andpolitical moment through fiction and the significance of this choice is whatthis panel will examine. Can Modernist literature be understood as testimony?What is the specific ability of literature and of fiction to testify to the"truth" of Modernism?